බිත්තරය සහ ගොළුබෙල්ලා
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka is turning its back on a globalised world in which two million of its people already work abroad and foreign workers fill jobs at home. Rather than despise young people’s dream of emigrating, the state should equip them with vocational training and English to go legally; the nursing schools, still teaching a 1935 syllabus in Sinhala, are his case in point. Those abroad must learn to live with other faiths and foods — the man who retches at snails peeled like eggs will not last — and Sri Lanka’s image, damaged by triumphalism, follows them.
අරාජිකත්වයේ අභියෝගය
Ivan reads the weeks since Vesak as signs of a country drifting into anarchy: rotten institutions are collapsing with nothing to replace them. A monk’s staged self-immolation, sold to television by a journalist as an exclusive; a Deputy Inspector General, Vass Gunawardena, exposed as a kidnapper and contract killer; the fusion of politicians and the criminals who guarded them during the insurgencies; and a push to scrap the Thirteenth Amendment unilaterally. He traces Indo-Lankan hostility to the UNP’s 1977 insults to Indira Gandhi and warns that breaking the Accord would complete the slide.
හරක් මස් වාදය
After a monk set himself alight at the Temple of the Tooth on Vesak in protest at cattle slaughter, Ivan takes the anti-beef campaign apart on its own terms. A dairy industry, which the same patriots demand, cannot survive if spent cows cannot be sold for meat, as India’s Muslim market makes possible; vegetarianism without planning deprives people of complete protein; and ancient Sinhala Buddhist kings hunted and ate game. Beneath it, he argues, lies Dharmapala’s anti-Muslim racism — and a quarrel with a world Muslim community twenty times the size of the Tamils would be ruinous.
රාවය ප්රතිසංවිධාන
Ivan replies to Mahesh Hapugoda, who read his wish to make Ravaya a paper for readers’ wives and children as a slide into Nihal Peiris-style entertainment. He rejects both that reading and its view of women, and offers as proof a piece written for parents and daughters: on whether one needs a hero. His own is Gandhi, with Socrates second; he recalls his lawyer Suranjith Hewamanna, who modelled himself on Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, contrasts J.R. Jayewardene’s Napoleon, and warns through Nietzsche, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran against hero worship.
මගේ සිහිනය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Replying to readers’ reactions to his plan to reorganise Ravaya, Ivan explains his habit of seeing things unconventionally, as Gandhi and Mandela did, and sets his plan against his forecast that Sri Lanka is heading for anarchy. After Prabhakaran’s defeat the political system stood exposed; Mahinda Rajapaksa, the only leader left, failed to rebuild the state, and parties on both sides are historically spent. With a monk’s self-immolation over cattle slaughter and the row over the Thirteenth Amendment as signs, he argues Ravaya must be strengthened to guide readers through the coming collapse.
19 වැනි සංශෝධන කෙටුම්පත ගැන
Ivan welcomes the campaign by Maduluwawe Sobitha’s National Movement for a Just Society to abolish the executive presidency, but argues its draft Nineteenth Amendment is a concept paper with a narrow vision. Every Sri Lankan constitution, and Chandrika Kumaratunga’s 2000 draft, was made by cunning or majority power rather than on the sovereignty of the people, as India and South Africa did. The draft ignores the unresolved question of who belongs to the nation, copies the flawed Constitutional Council of the Seventeenth Amendment, and keeps a simple-majority impeachment of judges.
ජාතියේ හා ආගමේ නාමයෙන් රට රැගෙන යන්නේ කොයිබටද?
Ivan warns that the anti-Muslim campaign now being led by groups of monks mirrors the climate before 1915, 1958 and 1983. He retells the 1915 Sinhala–Muslim riots, rooted in Dharmapala’s revival and Sinhala traders’ envy of Muslim commerce, and traces the Muslims’ long history in the island. Such a riot now, he argues, would be ruinous, and its premise betrays Buddhism itself: from the Kalama Sutta and the parable of the raft to Asoka’s edicts and Walpola Rahula, the Buddha’s teaching is one of free inquiry and tolerance.
අන්තෝ ජටා බහි ජටා
Ivan asks why more than a hundred thousand deaths in two insurrections have left so little mark on Sri Lankan thought and literature, recalling conversations with Simon Navagattegama and Ediriweera Sarachchandra and a sharp exchange with Sugathapala de Silva. He argues that caste, not only race and class, drove both rebellions: Wijeweera and Prabhakaran came from parallel non-dominant castes and drew their foot soldiers from oppressed ones. Only Premadasa grasped this, and the chance to rebuild society after the LTTE’s defeat has been squandered.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (3) — ධර්මපාලගේ සිට පැරණි වම දක්වා
In the final part of the series Ivan surveys the currents that shaped modern Sinhala political thought and finds that none could build a nation. Anagarika Dharmapala’s liberationist vision had room only for Sinhala Buddhists; the Ceylon National Congress spoke of one Ceylonese nation but had no plan to unite it; the Gandhian Jaffna Youth Congress had the most progressive vision but wrecked itself with the 1931 election boycott; and the brilliant Marxist Old Left, schooled on Lenin and Trotsky rather than Locke and Mill, cared for class, not nation.
ආණ්ඩුවේ ඉදිරි දැක්ම හා කාර්ය සාධනය
Ivan assesses the Rajapaksa government from its narrow 2005 victory to its unrivalled post-war dominance, crediting the defeat of the LTTE and real progress in resettlement and rehabilitation. He argues that the UNP’s opposition to the war destroyed its own base, that the government has given Tamils everything except their dignity, and that leaning towards China while breaking promises to India ignores the island’s geopolitical position. Mahinda Rajapaksa, he concludes, dreams like Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir or J.R. Jayewardene of development without democracy.